Chapter 71
SEVENTY-ONE
EMMA
I rose slowly to my feet, my gaze locked on the High Chief.
My blood buzzed.
My every nerve was lit and humming.
And beneath it all, a single thought pulsed like a drumbeat: This ends today.
I stood a few feet from the High Chief, with only Petru, Caden and Rachel flanking me. We were out of breath, but not out of fight. Tired but determined.
The ground seemed to pulse with every beat of my heart, but I held my stance.
The High Chief tilted his head slightly, studying me as if he still couldn’t quite figure me out, while I burned with the kind of power he had spent cycles trying to acquire.
When he finally spoke, the words were laced with venom, broadcast loud enough for every fighter, every Offensive or Radical, every dying soldier on this battlefield to hear.
“Miss Thompson,” he said, the formal title sliding off his tongue like a blade.
"Even if we cannot kill you—to preserve a future where magi survive—you now understand…" He jerked his chin toward the spot where Sean and Jackson had stood just moments ago, "…you can still be broken."
He stepped forward, robes whispering through the blood-smeared dust, his gaze fixed on mine with unnerving calm.
“Not killing you feels like unfinished business. But fortunately, as I’ve said before, you have no shortage of people you love.”
He tilted his head, eyes gleaming.
"The loss of your Specialist. Crown’s First Offensive. Now your friend, the Orator. And of course...your parents. Though I can’t take credit for those."
I gritted my teeth, rage and grief tangling in my chest like fire and glass. And underneath it, a sliver of relief he had missed how I’d healed my friend.
“I suggest,” he said, his voice dropping low and razor-sharp, “you tread carefully.”
His gaze slid from me to Caden.
“Or the man you’re willing to sacrifice the entire Magi World for, dies today as well.”
He moved faster than I expected—a brutal, ancient flick of his hand—and a bolt of invisible haze sliced through the air toward Caden.
I reacted instinctively, throwing up a shield, one not unlike the kind I’d just unraveled from Jackson. It flared between them right in time, catching the blast before it hit. Caden barely had time to flinch.
The High Chief’s eyes widened, only for a heartbeat, before his mask of arrogance settled back into place.
Petru moved beside me, taking a step forward, hand already lifting—
“Don’t,” Caden hissed, eyes locked on the High Chief. “Let her handle it.”
Slava’s Leader raised a quick brow, then dropped his hand.
And I stepped forward.
“You know what your problem is?” I asked softly, my scarlet haze building at my fingertips.
“Enlighten me.”
“Like every old man too set in his ways to evolve, you can’t see what’s right in front of you.”
I fired the first bolt. He deflected it with ease.
Of course. The shield.
“You can’t see how your own actions have set in motion exactly what you have tried to prevent.”
Another bolt. Another effortless deflection.
“You can’t see you signed your own death warrant.”
Another strike, harder this time.
“And least of all…” My crimson energy surged, wrapping around me like a second skin. “You can’t see me.”
Between almost killing Jackson, murdering Saoirse, and killing Stephen, the Chiefs had turned me into a monument of pain, and pain was one hell of a weapon.
I reached deep into the marrow of my bones, into the roaring furnace that had been building inside me since the first lie, the first betrayal, the first loss.
And I translated.
Not the way they did.
It wasn’t magic.
It was me.
My fury.
My grief.
And then I moved.
My Skindo shot out, like a whip of molten steel snapping from my hand. It cut through the haze-heavy air with a vicious, slicing shriek, aimed straight for the High Chief’s chest.
With a flick of my other wrist, my Chela manifested in my other hand, ready to suck all translation out of anyone who dared to come close.
At the same time, my good old choking haze exploded outward from me in all directions.
It wasn’t clean. It wasn’t noble.
It was suffocating.
It clung to the ground, to the Chiefs, to the Offensives still stupid enough to stand in my way. It dragged the air out of their lungs, made them stagger, made them choke on their own fucking magic.
The High Chief recoiled as the blades of my Skindo slashed across his shoulder, the force of it knocking him back a step. His robes shredded at the contact, blood blooming dark and vivid against the white fabric.
He bared his teeth, raising a hand to counter, but my haze struck faster, faster than translation should have allowed. It wrapped around him, clawed at his power, pressed down with the weight of every broken law, every shattered rule of magic they thought they understood.
I didn’t stop. I wouldn’t stop.
Not until he felt what he tried to turn me into.
Not until he broke, exactly like he’d tried to break me.
The Chief stumbled back, eyes blazing with fury.
And then, he fucking tried again. The haze around him surged, swirling upward in a wide arc, forming a dome of translucent power.
I felt it before I saw it. The shift in the air. The pressure-drop, as if the world was holding its breath.
Another bubble.
His last lifeline. His last weapon. A desperate bid to mute my powers, to take back control, to remind everyone here that he still ruled.
But not this time.
Caden’s explanation flashed through my mind: The bubble is like water. It extinguishes the fire that is translation.
I clenched my jaw, feeling the power coiling hot under my skin. Let’s see what kind of fuel I can bring.
My red haze ignited instantly, rising like fire through my veins, meeting his dome mid-formation, and then I reached for the other.
The gold inside me flared, my healing haze pulsing out from my core and wrapping itself around the red.
Like a sweet fucking candy cane.
Not layered. Not separate.
Both hazes, working as one.
A single force. Mine.
The fusion of the two snapped into place like thunder cracking through silence, and it hit his haze mid-air, hard.
His bubble didn’t complete. It didn’t even resist.
It shattered.
Glass-like shards of unstable magic cracked and collapsed in on themselves, a slow, glowing implosion that sucked the breath from the square. The Chief’s body jerked forward from the backlash, staggered by the sheer force of the failed construct.
He stared at me like he no longer recognized what I was, like he couldn’t even comprehend it.
“Not possible,” he hissed, his voice cracking under the strain. “Two hazes? You are an abomination!”
The smile that tore across my face was pure, feral, something wild and wicked I didn’t even try to hide.
“Yes,” I said, the syllable dripping with promise. “An abomination that’s about to fuck you up real good.”
Without waiting for him to recover, I reached deeper into the well of power inside me, ready to try something I’d only ever seen done once before.
Men were such simple creatures, they always thought everything had to be big.
Just like their dicks, they thought bubbles were only about size, or scale.
But I wasn’t thinking big.
I was thinking precise.
I shifted my stance, gold and red haze intertwining around me in perfect, living harmony. I extended one hand—steady, open—and pointed straight at the High Chief.
One thought only: containment.
The air shimmered around him, no surge, no warning. Only a soft, sickening twist of energy. And then, in an instant, he was encased.
A perfectly circular bubble snapped shut around him, small, flawless, inescapable.
No ripple of warning. Only vast control.
His eyes flew wide. Hands slammed into the inner wall of the dome.
“Impossible!” he choked, sounding muffled behind the golden-red shimmer. “You… No magi can do this!”
I didn’t answer. I simply raised my other hand.
And then I did it again.
And again.
And again.
Hundreds of threads surged outward from me like living lightning, latching onto every single hostile Offensive in the square.
One by one, tiny bubbles bloomed across the battlefield, hundreds of perfect, flickering prisons, each containing a soldier who had once followed the Chiefs without question.
They shouted.
They thrashed.
Some tried to translate and died on the spot, others flung blades or fists against the invisible walls of their new cages.
But they weren’t going anywhere.
The battlefield slowed, as if the world itself exhaled all at once.
The shouting dulled into a low, broken murmur.
The clash of weapons and the crackle of magic died away.
Even the air, heavy with the stench of burning haze and blood, seemed to grow thicker, denser, pressing down on every chest.
And slowly, inevitably, the battle came to a halt.
The Cyclos Offensives, who only moments ago had fought and bled across these stones, were no longer charging. They moved now with cold precision, rallying together as one unit, their expressions grim as they killed the remaining United Chiefs.
There was no mercy in them. No hesitation.
They surged into the broken ranks of the Chiefs’ loyalists, shackling them with translation-proof cuffs, binding their hands with cords of magic that glowed harsh against their skin. It was swift. Efficient. Brutal in its simplicity.
The United Chiefs' armies were finished.
And standing at the center of it all, locked inside the small, perfect prison I had woven with my own hands, was the High Chief.
Trapped.
His chest heaved with ragged breaths, his face pale beneath the blood and ash staining his skin. He slammed his fists uselessly against the golden-red haze of the bubble, again and again, the impacts leaving no mark, no cracks.
I watched him through the barrier, and in his eyes, I saw it: not just anger, but mostly disbelief.
As if he still couldn't comprehend it was me standing here, it was me who had undone him.
He threw back his head and bellowed, the sound a hoarse, broken roar that barely carried through the Metasphere.
“This is not the end!” he screamed. “I will not—”
But he broke off mid-sentence, his body stilling.
I felt it even before I saw it, the sudden, reckless pull of translation gathering at his core, the ripple of desperate power as he tried to do the one thing he had left: escape.
He was going to translate.
Inside my bubble.
Across the square, Caden shouted something—maybe a warning, maybe a curse—but it was already too late.
The High Chief moved, haze flaring at his fingertips, twisting the very air into a spiral of light…
The translation hit the walls of the bubble, and instead of breaking through, it recoiled.
The energy turned inward in a violent implosion, ripping the magic back into itself, snapping through his body with the force of a star collapsing.
There was no grand explosion.
No screams.
No spectacle.
One moment the High Chief was there, every line of his body straining against the impossible.
And the next… He simply wasn't.
A smear of light hung for a heartbeat where he'd been, like a dying ember caught on the wind.
Then even that faded.
The bubble collapsed in on itself, folding into nothingness, leaving only silence, and the burned imprint of a man who had fought for no more than his own survival.
Slowly, I straightened, my entire body vibrating with exhaustion and triumph and something heavier I didn’t dare name yet. Around me, the others began to stir: their faces stunned, their weapons lowering, their gazes locked on the spot where the High Chief had stood.
It was over.
The Chiefs had fallen.
The battle was over.
And somehow, impossibly, we were still standing.